Laterality and Handedness ..(Valerie Dejean)

" AND THE GOOD EAR WILL LISTEN TO WISDOM" ...Eccl. iii, 29

About the Spectrum Center

Developmental Model of the Tomatis Method

Delivery of the Tomatis Method

The Onset of Autism and PDD

Sensory History

Early Sensory Development

Changes to Expect When Doing Tomatis Listening

copyright Valerie Dejean 2008

THE SPECTRUM CENTER

The Leading Ear

Valerie Dejean, Spectrum Center,New York

Tomatis came up with the concept of the leading ear in the 1950's shortly after his discovery of the audio-vocal relationship known as the Tomatis Effect. From his work with opera singers Tomatis found "that the voice can only reproduce what the ear can hear". For his effort, the Academy of Science and Medicine at the Sourbonne recognized his findings and named them the "Tomatis Effect"

He found this by comparing the audiograms and the spectrographs of voices of singers and factory workers exposed to noise. What he found was that there were similar distortions in both functions. It was during these experiments while interfering with the singer's hearing in order to better study the parallels between displacements of the auditory and vocal scotoma's, he discovered the response reactions obtained from the ears were not identical.

To look at this further he set the singers up at a microphone that would feed the singers voice back to them via two headphones, one the left ear and one to the right ear. The attenuater allowed the subject to hear themselves either through the right ear, the left ear or both ears by changing the balance level. For this experiment they took well known singers, known for their voice, and known for the familiarity with the piece, and known for their endurance.

One of the singers they used had just finished 400 performances of the same work and every night he had done one or two encores of the same aria he was to sing during the experiment.

During the experiment all the attempts were recorded. The following findings were observed: Listening with the ear's balanced (we'll call that balance 10) the voice was the same as is the singer was singing without any apparatus. Neither the singer nor others noted any change Suppressing the left ear, and leaving the right alone in the controlling position, there was only slight modification. To the very trained ear, the sounds seemed lighter, more ethereal, more modulated, more precise, more distinct and the singer felt greater fluency but not necessarily observable to the general public.

When the reversed the control and placed the left ear in control and eliminated the right, the fluency vanished and all the professional qualities acquired by the singer broke down. The voice became heavy, coarse, less colorful and off pitch. Worst of all, the rhythm slowed down considerably. The destruction of the rhythm is beyond the reach of the singer's will. In some instances it would take the person double the time normally to perform the musical phrase. He could become aware of it, if someone beats time for him, but he is incapable of following the tempo. The blockage is not limited to singing. During the experiment, the subject movements became slower, more robotic like and a diminished capacity for voluntary control.

The same results were obtained when the ears were saturated with sound vs. blocking the sound as can be done with masking on an audiometer. So it wasn't lack of sound it was the cutting of control of the ear. Tomatis found the same phenomenon with the spoken voice. This time he did the same experiments with actors. With the left ear suppressed, (the right ear leading) the voice became lighter, more timbre and higher pitched. With the right ear eliminated, ( the left ear leading) the voice was flat, without tone or timbre and badly produced, it became filled with hesitations, with "ah's" and more prolonged. Even full blown stuttering.

The conclusions that Tomatis drew were that there is a preferential ear, designated to execute the more special and more precise control functions. He call this the Leading ear and using the analogy of the leading eye, it was the one that took aim in that the speaker takes aim at the sounds he emits....